Monday, May 21, 2018


Chernozem "black soil") is a black-colored soil containing a high percentage of humus (4% to 16%), and high percentages of phosphoric acidsphosphorus and ammonia.  Chernozem is very fertile and can produce high agricultural yields with its high moisture storage capacity.  The name comes from the Russian terms for black and soil, earth or land (chyorn + zemlya).  The soil, rich in organic matter presenting a black color, was first identified by Russian geologist Vasily Dokuchaev in 1883 in the tallgrass steppe or prairie of European Russia.  Chernozems cover about 230 million hectares of land.  There are two "chernozem belts" in the world:  the Eurasian steppe which extends from eastern Croatia (Slavonia), along the Danube (northern Serbia, northern Bulgaria (Danubian Plain), southern Romania (Wallachian Plain) and Moldova) to northeast Ukraine across the Central Black Earth Region of southern Russia into Siberia, and the other from the Canadian Prairies in Manitoba through the Great Plains of the United States as far south as Kansas.  Similar soil types occur in Texas and Hungary.  Chernozem layer thickness may vary widely, from several inches up to 60 inches (1.5 metres) in Ukraine.  The terrain can also be found in small quantities elsewhere (for example, on 1% of Poland).  It also exists in Northeast China, near Harbin.  The only true chernozem in Australia is located around Nimmitabel producing some of the richest soils in the nation.  There is a large black market for the soil in Ukraine, where it is known as chornozem.  The sale of agricultural land has been illegal in Ukraine since 1992, but the soil, transported by the truckload, has approximately US$900 million annually in black market sales.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem

Crunchy Pea Salad  Combine 20 oz. thawed frozen peas, 3/4 c. sliced water chestnuts, 3 tbsp. chopped green onions, and 2 tbsp. bacon pieces.  Toss gently with dressing made with 1/3 c. sour cream, 2 tbsp. red wine vinegar, 1 tbsp. milk, 1 tsp. sugar and 1/8 tsp. garlic powder.  Cover and chill. 

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper.  “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.”  The cause of his fury?  The editor had insisted on “correcting” split infinitives.  “Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place,” Shaw fulminated, “without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between ‘to suddenly go’, ‘to go suddenly’ and ‘suddenly to go’.”  Those who believe the split infinitive is a grammatical crime will see yet more evidence that standards are in a death spiral.  Those who have never seen anything wrong with it will be chagrined that we ever forbade it.  The second lot have the better argument.  The new guide says that sometimes splitting the infinitive is the best, or even only, option.  John Comly is the first known writer to issue a ban on the split, saying in 1803 that:  “An adverb should not be placed between a verb of the infinitive mood and the preposition ‘to’ which governs it.”  At the time this practice was not common, even though such splits had arisen in English almost as soon as “to” started appearing with infinitives.  They crop up, for example, in “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” in the 14th century.  The persistence of the “rule” is the true curiosity.  One explanation is that, like the dangling participle, the split infinitive has a catchy name, making the rule easy to pass on.  Another is that it is easy to spot; noticing something between “to” and a verb is a gratifyingly simple task.  A third is the shadow of classical languages.  Infinitives are single words in Latin and Greek, so early-modern authors who were influenced by them may have unconsciously avoided splitting the two-word English counterpart.  But “to” is not really part of the infinitive, much less an inseparable one.  In I can come, “come” is an infinitive with no “to”.  The split is thus not even a real phenomenon, much less one to shun.  Some writers, having abided by the rule for so long, will never manage to discard it.  Fine.  But the lazy remedy, merely to move a modifier one word left or right, is worse.  Constantly to do this results in an odd, jarring rhythm. (Robert Burns wrote “to nobly stem tyrannic pride” because it has a pleasingly punchy beat to it.)  And the “move it left or right” manoeuvre often means that the modifier ends up modifying the wrong thing, or creating an ambiguity.  “She decided to gradually retire” is clear.  But moving “gradually” left changes the meaning, while moving it right creates confusion:  a gradual decision or a gradual retirement?

May 6, 2018  Spyce--the world's first restaurant with robotic kitchen is now open   Daniel Boulud has a chain of successful restaurant enterprise spread across the globe.  So, when four MIT graduates approached him with an idea of a robotic kitchen, Daniel was excited to include it in his successful venture portfolio.  MIT grads Michael Farid, Brady Knight, Luke Schlueter, and Kale Rogers are the men behind this marvelous venture.  The dishes are designed by chef Sam Benson who has made tasty meals without human intervention possible.  All the required ingredients are picked by a runner and taken to one of the seven robotic chefs.  These chefs are large mechanical woks which cook your food with magnetic induction.  Once a dish is cooked, it is poured into a bowl.  Human workers garnish the meals and make it presentable.  Kashyap Vyas  https://interestingengineering.com/robotic-chefs-in-boston-give-a-glimpse-of-future-restaurants

For the 16th-century Italian noble, garlic posed a unique, culinary dilemma.  To demonstrate status, a person of taste and means served food prepared with the finest, rarest spices, such as saffron, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger.  Common ingredients were to be avoided, and garlic was neither rare nor fine.  But it was delicious.  So what was a noble lord or lady to do?  In order to have their garlic and eat it too, aristocrats’ chefs devised a loophole:  ingredient “ennobling.”  To make garlic and other stigmatized ingredients socially acceptable, they paired garlic with richer, more patrician foodstuffs:  meats, expensive spices, and aged cheeses.  These, through mere proximity, performed a sort of gastronomic alchemy that enabled garlic to shed the stench of poverty and appear on nobles’ tables.  In Renaissance-era Italian society, what you ate was intimately linked to social status.  This is evident in the gratuitous use of saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, in the cookbooks of the wealthy.  This link is also illustrated in literature from the period, which uses nicknames rooted in aromatic vegetables to refer to the lower classes, conflating the people with what they ate: “onion eaters” and “fava bean eaters” and “garlic eaters.  "Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.  Sign up for our weekly email."  Ryleigh Nucilli  Read more and see pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ennobling-garlic-italy?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas-page  Thank you, Muse reader!

Pictures, descriptions and the 22-page order of service for the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on May 19, 2018:  https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/royal-wedding-order-service-revealed-12559238

Justify won the 143rd running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.  The purse for the Preakness is $1.5 million, with $900,000 of that going to the winning owners (jockeys, trainers and other staff get a slice of that too, but the exact numbers aren’t known and likely vary).  Second, third, fourth and fifth place earn $300,000, $165,000, $90,000 and $45,000, respectively.  See the full finishing order at https://www.sbnation.com/2018/5/19/17372512/preakess-results-2018-finishing-order

May 20, 2018  If you've spent any time on the Internet this past week, you've probably heard and then argued over a certain viral sound clip.  He's saying, "Laurel," some people swear.  No, he's saying, "Yanny," others insist.  But for Broadway and television actor Jay Aubrey Jones, he hears himself.  Jones did some voice work for Vocabulary.com, recording more than 36,000 words for the website in 2007, including saying the word, "Laurel."  And apparently, that is the source audio for the "Laurel, Yanny" viral clip that's been driving the Internet crazy.  When I first heard this recording, I did not recognize my voice at all, Jones tells Weekend Edition Sunday's LuLu Garcia-Navarro.  "I think it has to do first of all with what has happened with people's computers or listening devices, also how people process sound, which is highly individual," he says.  Jones, whose three-decade Broadway career includes a run as an understudy in the musical Cats, also appeared on the television shows, The Michael J. Fox Show and Gotham.  Samantha Raphelson  https://www.npr.org/2018/05/20/612672766/the-voice-behind-the-laurel-or-yanny-recording-actor-jay-aubrey-jones

PBS will debut the premiere episode of The Great American Read, hosted by Meredith Vieira, at 8:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, May 22, 2018.  The official trailer is available here.  The eight-part series designed to spark a national conversation about reading will feature entertaining and informative documentary segments with compelling testimonials from celebrities, authors, notable Americans, and book lovers across the country, including Margaret Atwood, Chelsea Clinton, Morgan Freeman, George R.R. Martin, Shaquille O’Neal, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jason Reynolds, Gabrielle Union, Ming-Na Wen, and more.  America’s 100 best-loved titles, which were announced on April 20, includes a wide variety of titles, from classics like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to contemporary young adult novels like John Green’s Looking for Alaska.  With the premiere of the launch episode on May 22, The Great American Read will invite viewers across the nation to vote to choose America’s best-loved book.  Voting will close on October 18, and the grand finale will air October 23.   Sydney Jarrard  http://www.bookweb.org/news/pbs%E2%80%99s-great-american-read-premiere-may-22-104360

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1890  May 21, 2018 

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